Videos: Art With No Place to Call Home

As video cameras become more and more abundant, so does video art.

For example, at the American Film Institute’s seventh annual video festival last month, more than 120 hours of video works were shown and discussed. But one question kept coming up at panel discussions and in the informal chatter on the patio of the Mark Goodson building: Where else will these videos be seen?

The consensus answer: Probably nowhere--except for maybe another festival or two, or in rare, special presentations such as the Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent display of unusual television fare. Video art may be growing by leaps and bounds, but how about places to see video art?

There are only a few festivals held each year on the scope of the AFI event, and each has plenty of new works to choose from. There are other locations where independent videos are shown--but almost none that exhibit new works on a regular basis. In the Los Angeles area, for example, video art is shown on anything like a regular basis only at LACE downtown, John Dorn’s EZTV in West Hollywood and the Long Beach Museum of Art.

The picture is even gloomier when it comes to broadcast and cable television. Networks and local stations, of course, have almost no interest in video art. And cable? Years ago there was hope that cable would turn out to be an important outlet for the unusual and the offbeat. As we now know, there are almost as many commercial pressures in this area as in broadcast TV. Except for a few public-access programs, cable TV is not very open to adventurous, small-budget video.

And what if you’ve made a really outrageous video--one that’s likely to cause heated controversy? You might not even be able to get your work shown at an event as encompassing and liberal as AFI’s.

That fact was exemplified at the AFI festival. During a panel discussion about the scores of videos shown under the umbrella of a festival category called “Only Human: Sex, Gender and Other Misrepresentations,” curators B. Ruby Rich and Bill Horrigan revealed that they had decided against including two works by video maker Rodney Werden.

The reason: The material and images dealt with extremely unusual sexual practices. However, another of Werden’s works, “Blue Moon,” was shown.)

Ironically, this admission came just a few minutes after panelists Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, video-art producers and distributors from Ontario, Canada, had made some pointed comments about censorship of videos. The pair emphasized that artists must worry not only about state censorship (a big issue in Canada this year), but also the refusal of sexual subjects and images by institutional festivals.

Even if an independent video is outstanding and not especially controversial, it stands little chance of being seen but by a select few. Case in point: George Kuchar’s “Video Album 5: The Thursday People.”

Of the several videos shown in AFI’s “New Works” category, Kuchar’s humorous, touching tribute to fellow film maker Curt McDowell caused some the most excitement among festival-goers. During an enthusiastic question-and-answer session after the showing, Kuchar was asked if the video had been submitted to such outlets as PBS or cable’s Arts & Entertainment channel.

The film maker-turned-video-devotee said he felt there was so little chance of acceptance at such networks that he hadn’t thought to submit it on his own. However, Kuchar said, he’d recently signed up with the Kitchen, a New York alliance of artists that produces and distributes video art, and “the people there are going to try to get it on PBS.”

The Kitchen is part of a new breed of independent-video and video-art distributors. Their efforts may do a lot to change the lack of venues for non-commercial television.

For those who have produced video works but are having trouble getting them seen by anyone outside their families, here, in no particular order, are phone numbers for the Kitchen and similar video-art consortiums. The list was drawn from AFI sources and from Patricia Polinger at Vidiots, the Santa Monica store where many video-art works and collections can be located for purchase or renting:

The Kitchen, (212) 473-6822 . . . V-Tape (founded by Steele and Tomczak), Ontario, Canada, (416) 863-9897 . . . Independent World Video, Los Angeles, (818) 766-6877 . . . New Video, New York, (800) 431-2299 . . . Video Data Bank, Chicago, (312) 443-3793 . . . Direct Cinema, L.A., (213) 652-8000 . . . Video Out, Vancouver, Canada, (604) 688-4336 . . . Modern Visual Communication, (213) 785-0778 . . . California Newsreel, San Francisco . . . (415) 621-6196. Art/Com, San Francisco, (415) 431-7524 . . . London Video Arts, London, England, (01) 734-7410.

The number for EZTV is (213) 657-1532; for Vidiots, (213) 392-8508.